Students at Milecimo da Silva High School recently simulating Nazi human experiments in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. (Screenshot from Facebook via JTA)

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilian high school students simulated medical experiments that the Nazis conducted on concentration camp prisoners during the Holocaust.

The students at Milecimo da Silva high school in Rio De Janeiro were recently assigned to re-create a Nazi laboratory for a science fair. According to the Brazilian Israelite Confederations, the country’s umbrella Jewish organization, the purpose of the exhibition was to highlight the supposed scientific progress made by Nazi doctors working in concentration camps.

Photos posted on Facebook show a red banner hung in the school with swastikas and white letters saying “Nazi laboratory.” In the darkened fake blood-stained “lab,” students playing doctors wear medical uniforms and swastika armbands. Others pretend to be suffering patients.

A banner reading “Nazi laboratory” recently hanging in Milecimo da Silva high school in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. (Screenshot from Facebook via JTA)

The Rio State Department of Education reportedly has opened an investigation to determine whether the school promoted Nazism, which is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine.

Notorious Nazi physician Josef Mengele as a young doctor and the ‘ramp’ at Auschwitz-Birkenau in May of 1944, where Mengele sometimes selected inmates for life, death or ‘experimentation’ (Public domain)

During World War II, a number of German physicians — notably Josef Mengele — conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent. The experiments sought to improve the performance of Nazi soldiers and advance the Nazis’ racial ideology, including the inferiority of Jews, 6 million of whom were exterminated during the Holocaust.

In April, a third-grade classroom in a private school in Recife, in northeastern Brazil, was decorated with Nazi flags during a lesson on totalitarian regimes. The teacher wore a Nazi armband. The school later praised him on social media for the lesson.

After facing criticism, the school’s officials conceded that the tone of their post was inappropriate and took it down, but they refused to apologize for the lesson, according to the local Jewish federation.

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